5. Google acknowledges that there may be link "spikes", and so an influx of new links will be interpreted as legitimate if some of links are from "authoritative" sites. Go after links from authoritative sites.

6. If a stale webpage continues to receive new incoming links, it will be considered fresh. Keep adding links pointing to important pages.

7. Links from fresh pages will in some cases be more valuable than links from "stale" or old pages that have not been recently updated. Get links from pages that are active. If you have high value links from important sites, develop a strategy for keeping those links fresh.

8. Google places more value on a site where link growth remains constant and slow. Slow and steady wins race. Keep getting those links.

9. Pages with many inbound links will require proportionately more new links in order to remain fresh. The assumption is that more links a page has, more it should be getting in future. Otherwise it starts slipping into "stale" category. Focus more attention on your most important pages.

Regardless of whether of not Google implements all of these criteria, general direction is clear. More importantly, these points make good SEO sense, and provide a very good place to start when planning a link strategy.

On top of that, they propose tracking user habits and patterns over time. How users got to page in question, how long they stayed there, how many times particular page was clicked on when it was presented in a search...a very impressive (bewildering?) array of factors.

In fact this is an ingenious attempt to solve "spam" and "staleness" problems at same time. The major assumption is that up-to-date "relevant" content -- kind search engines are supposed to be giving us -- will be regularly updated, will be inter-connected by an ever-increasing (and regularly changing) group of inbound links. In other words, links will come and go, changes will happen gradually, and "spikes" in either traffic or increased link activity will be sure signs of spamming activity.

Conclusions

Whether all of these measures will ever be fully implemented or not is beside point. These suggestions make sense, and will be adopted to some extent by all search engines. The future has been defined, and it is up to creators of websites and online marketers to make most of it.

The most important conclusions we can take from patent application is that history of our pages matters. In practical terms, this means:

-- Rapid and wholesale changes in content will be looked upon with suspicion -- Rapid increases in numbers of inbound and outbound links will trigger red flags -- Changes in anchor text that alter or remove its relationship to on-page content will be suspect -- Lack of regular and steady (but not radical) changes will get your pages labelled "stale" -- Links that were valuable last year (or month?) will not be as valuable this year (or month) because they are becoming "stale".

In other words, webmasters and internet marketers must keep adding content, keep upgrading their pages, keep improving and adding new ones, continue to get new links, and freshen up their old ones if they can.

But they should not do any of it too quickly.

Think of this "history" component as a method of measuring change. It may seem ridiculously vague, but this is reality we have to deal with.

In new world order, change has three speeds: Too Slow, Too Fast, and Just Right.